Made {In} The Shade

Just wanted to get this in quick before the busy last 2 days of Memorial Weekend. We have baseball games for my husband both days, so it will get hectic. Go Rio!! Hope everyone has a great holiday and safe travels!

I promised I'd show you the other project that I finally got around to finishing along with my ironing board, so here it is. A lamp makeover. Hope you weren't sitting on the edge of your seat for too long  LOL.

The "after" picture was a dreary day so it was hard to get a good picture of it, sorry.

The story goes, I had this really cute antique lamp on my buffet in my living room. The bulb socket part was a little loose and my husband was convinced it was going to start a fire, so he really wanted me to use something else. I bought this ordinary goldish looking lamp for $4 at a local consignment shop. Can't beat that, right? I liked the glass middle part, but not the gold finish and I did not like the  lamp shade. It was going in my living room (which is browns & golds with aqua accent) so I wanted to recover the shade to match a lap rag quilt (on the left) that I had recently made. See the lovely shade?

First off, I taped up the glass part of the lamp and spray painted it a nice deep brown. I don't have a picture of that because I did it quite a while ago, but just tape it up really good. I put some fabric on the shade and attached it to the lamp, turned it on to see if the plaid in the shade would show through the fabric and it didn't, so I didn't need to spray paint the lampshade first. I made sure the shade was adequately covered with a piece of fabric, measuring my shade by the wider bottom piece.  Then I used my glue gun and secured the fabric to the shade with a trail of glue all around the bottom and top edges. I didn't want glue in the middle of the shade as I was afraid you'd be able to see glue marks when the lamp was on.  Make sure your fabric seam matches the seam on the shade. As you can see, I didn't think of that when I glued mine on and....... yeah, wish I would've. Oh well. As my mother always says, file it under "L" for  live and learn.

 

Then I glued the bottom and top edges under the shade, pulling tight.

 

After I let it dry a few  minutes, I went back and trimmed the excess off.

Lastly, I put a piece of ribbon over my seam .

Now I have a new lamp in my living room that brings out the aqua in my eyes I mean lap quilt!

 

Quit the improvement, eh? 

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